


Hero

by BeaRyan



Category: The Returned (TV 2015)
Genre: Angst, Bad Decisions, Drunkenness, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-30
Updated: 2015-04-30
Packaged: 2018-03-26 10:02:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 839
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3846736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BeaRyan/pseuds/BeaRyan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jack's drunk and Helen has a plan. Written late in season one.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hero

The nice thing about having your own bar was that you could play whatever the fuck you wanted on the jukebox. The bad part about having that power was that sometimes you forgot that a great album had a knife in the chest hidden in it. The lyrics of Foo Fighter's “Hero” cut into Jack. "There goes my hero. Watch him as he goes. He's ordinary." 

Jack’s girls had looked at him like he was Superman when they were younger. As they’d gotten bigger, he’d become smaller in their eyes. Into their teens he’d still been someone they could count on, steady if not heroic. When they’d lost Camille, he’d become even less than that. A drunk who hit his daughter. 

Now he had two children again, but he his status hadn’t risen with Camille’s body. They looked at him like he couldn't handle it. He would have liked to be mad, but they were right. It was all too much. Camille was back from the dead. Claire was banging her, no, _their _crank therapist. Lena was the most rational of the lot of them and she'd made a run for it. Smart girl.__

__He splashed another shot into his glass and let himself study the woman at the end of the bar. That was one perk of owning a place that was only a half-step above Tinder. If you wanted to look, you looked. She was approximately his age, dark hair, sharp eyes, and not unattractive. She was also vaguely familiar, but out of place somehow. Not a tourist, not that this town had ever had tourists._ _

__He picked up his glass and rolled towards her with a practiced, steady gait. A lesser man, one more prone towards sobriety, would have been wobbling, but Jack was a professional. He had the business license and the arrest record to prove his affinity for alcohol._ _

__He stopped before he reached her and cold dread knotted in his stomach. This was wrong. She was wrong._ _

__She picked up her glass and closed the distance between them. "You don't remember me, do you?"_ _

__It was a line. He knew about lines. He’d heard too many. Done too many. Just a line._ _

__He could play the game. “You look like someone I met once a long time ago. She was unforgettable.” He could pretend she wasn’t dead, or undead, and not the same woman who’d taken him for a roll in the grass along the eastern edge of the shore formed by the new dam almost thirty years ago. He’d been a teenager, mad about breasts. She’d been mad at someone else. In hindsight it probably hadn’t been spectacular for her, but he’d thought at the time that he’d never forget her. It had been easy to give in to her then, and it was easy to do it again tonight._ _

__Finally someone who knew what she wanted. She wanted to leave with him. She wanted to go to the construction site on route five and steal a few things. She said the explosives they took were just fancy fireworks. It wasn’t true but he was an expert in downplaying the reality of the situation._ _

__She reminded him he’d worked for his father’s demolition company as a teenager and asked him to place the charges. He didn’t know shit about charges, but she ran her hand across his back and assumed he was smart. It was better than being assumed dumb. He followed her into the tunnel under the dam and didn’t ask where she’d gotten the keys._ _

__She was probably a terrorist. Could terrorists be hot? Well, hottish. Claire was hot. Helen was determined. It was reassuring really, a woman who knew what she wanted. What she said she wanted was to free the dead and give them the peaceful, eternal rest they craved. Not a bad goal as far as goals went. Jack wanted a 21 year old bottle of Glenlivet. The reviews called the scotch subtle and layered. He suspected Helen’s goal had a lot more nuances than his._ _

__“Light it,” she ordered._ _

__He pulled the lighter from his pocket. It was a heavy, silver one with a nautical design on the side. It had always made him feel like he was sailing away through a storm instead of sucking on tar and nicotine after being forced out of his own home and into bad weather. He stared into the flame through a whiskey fog and asked, “Are you sure about this?”_ _

__“Light it,” she repeated. “The world will be better off without this town.”_ _

__“Won’t we die, too?” he asked._ _

__“You know I’m dead already,” she countered. “What makes you think you’re not?”_ _

__Jack weighed the evidence. The dead couldn’t rise, so Camille couldn’t be back, however, he could have joined her. There could have been a car accident or a fire, something that had killed and reunited his entire family._ _

__They were dead but not at peace._ _

__He could be his family’s hero again._ _

__Jack lit the fuse._ _


End file.
